Handke and the Patriots

Milan Djordjevic’

Peter Handke was back in Belgrade. But the only people present when the Serbian
translation of his book [Justice for Serbia: a winter journey to the Danube, Sava, Morava and
Drina rivers'] was launched at the National Library were scribblers from Politika's infamous
'Echoes and Reactions' page: patriots, congress orators, fighters for 'our cause', guardians of
the small-town mindset.

Until a few months earlier, hardly any of these esteemed personalities had ever heard of the
writer Peter Handke. Let alone read his books or watched his plays. His books and plays
would most probably only have scandalised them. Today, however, when it is clear to
everybody that Handke 'loves our country', 'loves our people', and is willing to testify 'on our
behalf', it is all quite different. How shall I put it, the man is suitable in every way, to the
point where he could perfectly well have been received on the President's own sofa.
Handke, it seems, is a naive and well-intentioned person. Never having lived, however, for
any amount of time in an East European country or a 'people's democracy', he has not the
slightest notion of what goes on here. As a writer he is interested only in immediate events,
and in this famous travelogue of his writes only about what he has seen - all of which he
seems to find vaguely exotic. What he saw, however, was next to nothing. Such naivety
and such writing are reminiscent of the 'naivety' and the writings of assorted fellow travellers
after visits to the Soviet Union at the time of Stalin's purges, repression and show trials. In
just the same way did our innocent Handke end up among people who foster a by-no-means-
innocent small-town mindset: people who have participated - and still participate - in mass
deception and self-deception.

We who live in this country of authentic surrealism, where militarists and bullies preach
peace, where naked lies are presented as truths, where robbers preach honesty, and where
blind devotion to the leader is considered supreme patriotism - we who in recent years have
been subjected to every kind of manipulation and witnessed every kind of crime - cannot be
shocked by the paradox of a nonconformist (which Handke undoubtedly is) addressing the
flower of our hyper-conformist 'intelligentsia' and receiving self-satisfied applause from that
select society. For this was just one more carnival performance and cultural show (in line
with the ruling party's slogan: 'With culture everything is more beautiful!') amid the false
normality that overlays our poverty, neglect and lack of future.